Sometimes, especially when I have read in some data from a file, I
like to see what symbols have been defined. If I suspect that there
are symbols of the form foonnn, I will add the command ?Global\foo* to
a notebook. This has worked for several years.
Using the new version 4.1 on MS Windows 98 (Second Edition), I am
getting unpleasant behavior. Sometimes it works as expected, but most
of the time the front end hangs. (microrant: why is there still no
interrupt/abort for the front end?) Not only does it hang, but if I
wait for a long time before using CTRL+ALT+DEL to kill it, subsequent
attempts to start up Mathematica hang on "initializing internal
clipboards...". I was able to restart Mathematica only after deleting
the .m file for the offending notebook.
I presume there is a lot of data to look at in Global, and I shouldn't
be accessing it this way. Should I always use a namespace, or is
there some other mechanism entirely?
Stu Schaffner
not speaking for The MITRE Corp. nor for the Northeastern University
Dept of Physics